The Unbearable Bassington eBook

matched his appearance and showed no taint of the
sartorial disorder by which the bourgeois of the garden-city
and the Latin Quarter anxiously seeks to proclaim
his kinship with art and thought. His eccentricity
took the form of flying in the face of some of the
prevailing social currents of the day, but as a reactionary,
never as a reformer. He produced a gasp of admiring
astonishment in fashionable circles by refusing to
paint actresses--except, of course, those who had
left the legitimate drama to appear between the boards
of Debrett. He absolutely declined to execute
portraits of Americans unless they hailed from certain
favoured States. His “water-colour-line,”
as a New York paper phrased it, earned for him a crop
of angry criticisms and a shoal of Transatlantic commissions,
and criticism and commissions were the things that
Quentock most wanted.

“Of course he is perfectly right,” said
Lady Caroline Benaresq, calmly rescuing a piled-up
plate of caviare sandwiches from the neighbourhood
of a trio of young ladies who had established themselves
hopefully within easy reach of it. “Art,”
she continued, addressing herself to the Rev. Poltimore
Vardon, “has always been geographically exclusive.
London may be more important from most points of
view than Venice, but the art of portrait painting,
which would never concern itself with a Lord Mayor,
simply grovels at the feet of the Doges. As a
Socialist I’m bound to recognise the right of
Ealing to compare itself with Avignon, but one cannot
expect the Muses to put the two on a level.”

“Exclusiveness,” said the Reverend Poltimore,
“has been the salvation of Art, just as the
lack of it is proving the downfall of religion.
My colleagues of the cloth go about zealously proclaiming
the fact that Christianity, in some form or other,
is attracting shoals of converts among all sorts of
races and tribes, that one had scarcely ever heard
of, except in reviews of books of travel that one
never read. That sort of thing was all very well
when the world was more sparsely populated, but nowadays,
when it simply teems with human beings, no one is
particularly impressed by the fact that a few million,
more or less, of converts, of a low stage of mental
development, have accepted the teachings of some particular
religion. It not only chills one’s enthusiasm,
it positively shakes one’s convictions when
one hears that the things one has been brought up
to believe as true are being very favourably spoken
of by Buriats and Samoyeds and Kanakas.”

The Rev. Poltimore Vardon had once seen a resemblance
in himself to Voltaire, and had lived alongside the
comparison ever since.

“No modern cult or fashion,” he continued,
“would be favourably influenced by considerations
based on statistics; fancy adopting a certain style
of hat or cut of coat, because it was being largely
worn in Lancashire and the Midlands; fancy favouring
a certain brand of champagne because it was being
extensively patronised in German summer resorts.
No wonder that religion is falling into disuse in
this country under such ill-directed methods.”